Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Figure 1.Prof Ekhard Salje Members of the Mineralogical Society will have been greatly saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Ekhard Salje in February, at the age of 78.Ekhard was well known within the University of Cambridge and widely across the international communities of scientists in Physics, Materials Physics and Earth Sciences.He was born in Hannover and would occasionally describe the difficult experience of growing up in severely straitened circumstances immediately after the war.He began to prosper at University where his early scientific interests in group theory evolved into crystallography by the time that he became Professor at a young age in the Institute of Mineralogy, Leibniz University Hannover.Then, as in all the ensuing years, his research focussed relentlessly on the relationship between the structure and properties of materials.In particular, he was interested in fundamental aspects of phase transitions that occurred within crystals in response to changes in temperature, pressure and external field.Ekhard came to the Department of Earth Sciences in Cambridge as a lecturer in 1985 and was quickly promoted to a Personal Chair in Mineral Physics before transferring to the established University Chair of Mineralogy and Petrology.He was Head of Department between 1998 and 2008 and continued his remarkable productivity after his formal retirement in 2013.Google Scholar lists 882 publications with over 33,000 citations.He will be remembered by PhD students as a constantly encouraging and inspiring supervisor and by undergraduates for lectures which were usually pitched at a level well above their competence but which were never dull.Ekhard's expertise was in three aspects of modern solid state physics -theory, experiment (including development of new experimental apparatus) and computer simulation.He used physics to help understand minerals and minerals to provide new perspectives on physics, always with strong collaboration across the disciplines.For example, in the 1980's he treated albite as a ferroelastic material with coupling between order parameters for separate displacive and cation
Source: Mineralogical Magazine
Author: Michael A. Carpenter
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4415505894
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